Month: May 2017

New research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Harvard Medical School, published in Lab on a Chip, shows a microfabricated cardiac sensing platform that can monitor tissue adhesion, electrophysiology and contractility on a single device.  It’s used to test the effectiveness of new cardiac drugs.  Human heart cells are grown on the electrode-array chip, and then their cellular beating is tracked via electrical signals sensed by the interdigitated electrodes.

The use of such devices could yield significant advantages for cardiac drug development by signalling problems with a given drug candidate early in the process, long before clinical trials.  The technology may also obviate the need for animal testing.

Very interesting technology from µFraction8 based at Heriot Watt University in Scotland may help address sustainable farming approaches for food, animal feed and pharmaceuticals bioproduction.  Sustainable approaches can use 20x less land area.  Post bioreactor dewatering comprises ~40% of the cost of bioproduction; µFraction8’s microfluidic devices can potentially reduce the cost of dewatering by 75%, which would have a dramatic impact on viability.  See Akzo Nobel article for more details.